Trust in healing

For years I’ve been what the professionals call in ‘constant crisis’. This means that literally for over 8 years, my life has been in one crisis or another. PTSD and trauma related, there being a physical crisis and therefore threat to my safety and life. But also with coping with what was happening, the entail health crisis’. For 5 years I’ve been in hospital, bar a few months here and there. Emergency sections, emergency treatments, short term detentions, long term detentions, you get the picture. Everytime I was coping better in one respect, Something else was falling apart that was either in my control, or not. 

Recently, after a lot of therapy and work on stabilising my mental health, and a considerably difficult time of safeguarding involvement to protect my actual physical self from threat of harm from other people, I’ve started to really get better. But I’m struggling to trust it. For so many years I’ve been caught in that cycle of constant crisis that my brain feels autoprogrammed to prepare for the next crisis right now. I struggle to switch off, to calm down, I get stuck in the hypervigilence/ crash cycle (I’ll explain more what this means another time!) because I’m so used to something going wrong. I feel like I need to prepare myself for another attack, but I don’t. 

I am getting better, but I can’t settle with it. All the benefits I’m feeling right now ( and I could write a list) feel meaningless because it all feels so threatening. In my mind, if things are going well, it means something terrible is going to happen. For me, there’s evidence behind that belief because of circumstances that were out of my control that have happened to me before. The complex trauma meant I was always in the place of life dangering crisis. Even when he trauma stopped, I couldn’t release this cycle I was in in my head and it lead to me almost self sabotaging and causing things to be unsafe again, through my eating disorder, self harm, suicide attempts. I always thought something terrible was going to happen because that’s how I had lived for so many years so it felt ‘normal’. 

But, it’s not. It’s not for months now. I am safe, I am okay. I haven’t hurt myself, I’ve had no critical incidents, I am healing. It’s scary, and very new, and I don’t know if I can trust it yet, but I’m learning to. Everyday that goes by that I get a little strong, my confidence in my abilities to manage grow, the hope and belief that this is a new start, a new life, gets stronger. The ironic thing is that the unsafeness of my life for the past 8+ years essentially became ‘safe’ because it was predictable. This, while it feels so much better, feels a lot scarier because it’s unknown territory. But it is also amazing, it’s happy, it’s belly laughs and joking around, it’s crying and meltdown mania, it’s shaking with fear and anxiety attacks, it’s smiling until my mouth hurts and spontaneous trips out, it’s not perfect, but it is all I’ve wanted for my whole life. I am getting better for definite now, I am healing. 

Reality - trigger warning.

Reality right now

I’ve been under a lot of sections, ive had treatment against my will and been held in a safe place. I’m currently detained under a section 3 which is 6 months. Let me give ou an insight into my life right now;

Trapped, locked, I feel like I have no voice and even if I’m given the illusion I do, I don’t. In the end, the decisions are made for me. I’m not alllowed to have a day off, a wobble and miss out some of my menu plan. I’m not allowed to say i don’t want to gain anymore weight, no matter how hysterical I end up when I finally push myself to have a shower after a week of avoiding my body. I can plead with my team to reduce my menu plan, and nothing. I can beg for them to leave up for one day, but it’s a no go. I can pull out the tube, and another is put down. I can shout and kick and fight, and they just get more people in to hold me down. I feel disgusted with myself and the way I look, I don’t feel I can cope with the way I feel, but I can’t put my fingers down my throat and make it go away because my bathroom is locked, I can’t buy packets of diet pills and duretics and laxatives to expel this evil in my body because I’m not allowed out. If I run away, I get dragged back, but staff or the police. If I try and escape and end my life, I’m out on constant observations. I’m at a weight I cannot cope with and I feel out of control. I can only go out if there’s enough staff, my mood seems stable on the nurses discretion, if the weather is okay. My whole life is controlled and contorted around me. I feel out of my depth, like I’m drowning in mud. I lie in bed wandering why I’m still here, why I should go on. I drag myself out of bed not because I want to, because I have to. To please everyone. Because I don’t have a choice. No break. No bad day. No fall back to a little security of the eating disorder that I ache for so badly. I want a day off, a meal off, I want to remember what it’s like to feel okay again. 

This isn’t anything against my treatment, this is my eating disorder shouting harshly and threateningly. My eating disorder is threatened by the treatment I’m under because it doesn’t have an edge anymore. The only control it has, the only power is has is invisible now. It can’t praise me over a shrinking body or baggy clothes, it can’t control what I eat and don’t eat. So it just pummels me all day everyday with insults and anger, criticism and disgust that I should be doing something I can’t, I should be playing in its hands... but I’m not. I can’t. I would love for my recovery to be wholeheartedly my choice, because that would make it more admirable. But it’s not, especially days like today. It’s raw, it’s forced, it’s controlled by other people until I’m strong enough to have the control myself. My track record means I’ll probably not be given the control, with the trust, for a long time. The voice in my head is too powerful and I am not in control yet, true control. 

(Disclaimer, this is NOTHING against my treatment because his hospital has literally saved my life. It’s my eating disorder being very angry with my treatment and feeling threatened that it’s losing me)